The philosopher and teacher of rhetoric Richard Weaver is best known today for his book Ideas Have Consequences, which was one of the founding works of post-World War II American conservatism. Weaver argued in the book that the nominalism of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham produced a decline in Western civilization that has continued until the present day, and he called for a spiritual revival to stop the decline and, if possible, to reverse it.

How did Ockham accomplish this feat? As Weaver saw it, he did so through his doctrine of nominalism, and this in two ways. Nominalism takes words to be arbitrary signs: they do not designate essences but instead refer to bare particulars. Human beings, for example, don’t share the defining property of being rational animals, but are nothing but assortments that we find convenient to group together. The transcendentals, i.e., being, truth, goodness, and beauty fare no better. They too are arbitrary signs.

As you can well imagine, nominalism plays havoc with religion, albeit that Ockham was a Franciscan friar whom we might expect to defend it. God reduces to pure power, and natural law to choices by a despot. In the actual world, killing babies is wrong, but Ockham’s God could have said it was right, and had he done so, it would have been.

What Weaver values in property rights is that they express attachment to an ideal; it is in this sense that property rights are metaphysical. A property owner can say to the state, “I don’t care if my property can be put to more ‘efficient’ use by transferring it to someone else. It is mine, to do with as I wish.”